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Emerson and German Personality 



By 

Kuno Francke 



Reprinted from 

THE INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY, 

Burlington, Vermont, 

September, 1903. 



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Emerson and German Personality 



By 

Kuno Francke 






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Reprinted from 

THE INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY, 

Burlington, Vermont, 

September, 1903. 



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7 



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Copyright, 1903, by 

Frederick A. Richardson. 

Printed Sep'eniber, 1903. 






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npHE INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY 
renders a two-fold service to Science and 
Letters by publishing the works of the most 
autlioritative writers of the two continents, and 
by bringing to the cultured reader many interests 
which would otherwise be lost to him. All 
writers for this Journal niake their work fresh and 
inspiring ; they treat of wide interests, and along 
great lines. The essays are simple and attractive 
in form, that is, in style and ideas, and are of 
sufficient length to afford ample opportunity for 
an adequate and clear expression of the author's 
thought. Jf Finally, this Journal will furnish 
an arena in which widely differing conceptions of 
things may meet in honest rivalry, and where 
there will be perfect freedom of thought. But we 
need not state that this thought will always be 
reverent and sincere and in full harmony with all 
that is essential and fundamental in the great 
social, moral, and religious ideals. 

THE EDITOR. 



IN 

M 



■j^ 



EMERSON AND GERMAN PERSONALITY 

EMERSON was, above all, an American ; the love of his people 
was the controlling motive of his whole life; and if we were to 
express the great variety of his interests and sympathies by one 
central ideal, we could probably find no better name for it than American 
culture. Next to his own country, England occupied the foremost place 
in his affections. The history of the English people was to him not 
only the history of the life of his forefathers, and as such surrounded by 
the halo of romance, but it stood to him also for a most impressive 
object lesson, demonstrating the truth of the practical side of his own 
message, the teachings of self-reliance, tenacity of purpose, and common 
sense. It was through his delicate sense of artistic form that Emerson 
was drawn toward Italy and France; and no one who has read his esti- 
mates of Montaigne or Michelangelo can fail to see that, Puritan as he 
was, he had a keen appreciation of the genius of the Latin race. 
Germany was the only large country of western Europe which he never 
visited ; the only distinguished German with whom he entertained a friendly 
correspondence, Herman Grimm, crossed his path too late in life to add 
much to his range of vision. For the greatest German of his time, 
Goethe, Emerson, in spite of sincere admiration, had after all only a 
limited understanding; whereas, against the manners of the ordinary 
Teuton he even seems to have had a natural aversion. Wherein, then, 
lies the justification for emphasizing, nevertheless, Emerson's relation to 
Germany .' What side of his nature was aicin to German ways of 
thought and feeling? What particular inspiration did he receive from 
the great masters of German literature and philosophy .' What part of 
his own life-work has a special significance for the Germany of today .^ 
These are the questions which I shall attempt briefly to answer. 

L 

There is a widely spread notion that Germany is a land trodden down 
by militarism and bureaucracy. Independence of character and personal 
initiative, are, we are told, necessarily crushed out by governmental methods 
which force the individual, from boyhood on, into a system of complicated 
routine and make him a part of a huge, soulless mechanism. It would 
be futile to deny that the pressure exerted upon the individual by official 
authority is greater in Germany than in America, England, France, or 



2 GERMAN PERSONALITY 

Italy. Indeed, there is good reason for thinking that this very subordi- 
nation of the individual to superior ordinances has had a large share in 
the extraordinary achievements of German statecraft, strategy, industry, 
and science of the last fifty years. What I maintain is this. In spite 
of the intense supervision of personal conduct, of the supremacy of 
drill and regulation, of the overwhelming sway of historical tradition and 
class rule, in spite of all this there is to be found in Germany a decidedly 
greater variety of individual views, convictions, principles, modes of life, 
ideals, in other words, of individual character than in America. I do not 
wish here to analyze the causes of this remarkable phenomenon, beyond 
stating that one of these causes seems to me to lie in the very existence 
Df those barriers which in Germany restrict and hem in individual 
activity. It seems as though the pressure from without tended to force 
to light the life within. Certain it is that the German, while submitting 
to external limitations which no American or Englishman would tolerate, 
is wont to guard his intellectual selfhood with a jealous eagerness com- 
pared with which the easy adaptation of the American to standards not 
his own comes near to being moral indifference. His inner life the 
German seeks to shape himself; here he tolerates no authority or ordi- 
nance ; here he is his own master; here he builds his own world. 

It is easy to see how closely allied was Emerson's whole being to this 
side of German character. The moderation and harmoniousness of his 
temper preserved him from the angularity, the oddities and eccentricities 
which often go with the German insistence on pronounced intellectual 
personality. On this personality itself he insisted with truly German 
aggressiveness. Indeed, it may be said that his definition of the scholar 
as being not a thinker, but man thinking, — a definition which is at the 
root of Emerson's whole view of intellectual life, — is an essentially 
German conception, and places Emerson in line with those splendid 
defenders of personal conviction which have embodied German thought 
with all its rugged pugnaciousness, from the days of Luther to Lessing 
and Fichte, and finally to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. 

A few of the most important manifestations of this German love of 
spiritual individuality which seem to me to have a special bearing upon 
Emerson it may be useful to consider. 

What else but implicit trust in the supreme value of the inner life is 
it, if the Germans much more than other nations are given to expressing 
their contempt for appearances, if they have a delight, sometimes a cynic 
delight, in exposing shams of any kind, if they take the business of lite 
with a seriousness that often seems to rob it of lightness of movement and 
the gracefulness of fleeting forms ? Goethe's " Faust " is, in this respect 



KUNO FRANCKE 3 

also, a true index of national character. As a work of art it is unwieldy, 
uneven, volcanic, disconnected, fragmentary, barbaric. Scenes of supreme 
lyric power, of elemental passion, of deepest tragedy, of ravishing poetry, 
go side by side with cynic raillery, allegorical stammering, metaphysical 
lucubrations, bookishness, and pedantry. The sensuous impression of the 
whole upon an unbiased mind cannot be but bewildering and disiiuieting. 
And yet there stands out in it all a mighty personality, a mighty will ! 
The weaknesses, the falsehoods, the frivolities of the day are here 
unmasked ! The real concern of life, ceaseless striving for higher forms 
of activity, endless endeavor in the rounding out of the inner world, is 
brought home to us ! The very defects and shortcomings of the form 
reveal the vastness of the spirit which refused to be contracted into 
limited dimensions ! That thoughts like these were familiar to Emerson, 
that his own habitual state of mind was akin to the temper here described, 
needs no documentary demonstration. But it may not be out of place 
to quote a few passages which show how fuilv conscious he was himself 
of his affinity to this side of German character: — 

"What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers is a property which 
he shares with his nation, — an habitual reference to interior truth. The German intel- 
lect wants the French sprighlliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, 
and the American adventure ; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a 
superficial performance, but asks steadily, To ichat end? A German public asks for 
a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought ; but what is it for ? What does 
the man mean .' Whence, whence all these thoughts ? 

"Talent alone can not make a writer. There must be a man behind the book ; 
a personality which by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there set forth. 
* * * If he cannot rightly express himself today, the same things subsist and will 
open themselves tomorrow. There lies the burden on his mind, — the burden of 
truth to be declared, — more or less understood ; and it constitutes his business and 
calling in the world to see those facts through, and to make them known. What 
signifies that he trips and stammers ; that his voice is harsh and hissing ; that his 
methods or his hopes are inadequate ? That message will find method and imagery, 
articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak." 

Closely allied with the German contempt for appearances, and, like 
it, rooted in the high valuation of personality, is the often praised delight 
of the Germans in small things. He who knows how to enter lovingly 
into what is outwardly inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant, he who 
is accustomed to look for fulness of the inner life even in the humblest 
and most circumscribed spheres of society, to him new worlds will reveal 
themselves in regions where the hasty, dissatisfied glance discovers nothing 
but empty space. "Man upon this earth," says Jean Paul, "would be 
vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble, — were it not 



4 GERMAN PERSONALITY 

that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such 
a feeling, this, by implying a comparison of himself with something 
higher in himself, this it is which makes him the immortal creature that 
he is." Here we have the root of that German love for still life, that 
German capacity for discovering the great in the little, which has given 
to pur literature such incomparable characters as Jean Paul's own Quin- 
tus Fixlein, Wilhelm Raabe's Hungerpastor, or Heinrich Seidel's 
Leberecht Hiihnchen, which even today makes Germany the land of all 
lands where in the midst of the bewildering tumult of industrial and 
social competition there are to be found hundreds upon hundreds of men 
firmly determined to resist the mad desire for what is called success, per- 
fectly satisfied to live in a corner, unobserved but observing, at home 
with themselves, wedded to some task, some ideal which, however little 
it may have to do with the pretentious and noisy world about them, fills 
their soul and sheds dignity upon every moment of their existence. Is 
it necessary to point out that there never lived an American who in this 
respect was more closely akin to the German temper than Emerson ? 
He was, indeed, the Jean Paul of New England. New England country 
life, the farm, the murmuring pines, the gentle river, the cattle lowing 
upon the hills, the quiet study, the neighborly talk in the village store or 
on the common, — this was the world in which he felt at home, in which 
he discovered his own personality. Here he fortified himself against the 
foolish fashions and silly prejudices of so-called society; here he imbibed 
his lifelong hatred of vulgar ambition ; here there came to him that 
insight into the value of the unpretentious which he has expressed so 
well, " I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic ; I embrace the 
common ; I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low"; here he 
acquired that deep seated and thoroughly German conviction of the 
dignity of scholastic seclusion and simplicity, which has made his whole 
life a practical application of his own precept: — 

"He (the student) must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his glees 
and his glooms alone. His own estimate must be measure enough, his own praise 
reward enough for him. * * * How mean to go blazing, a gaudy butterfly, in 
fashionable or political salons, the fool of society, the fool of notoriety, a topic for 
newspapers, a piece of the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of the russet coat, 
the privacy, and the true and warm heart of the citizen ! " 

The natural counterpart to this high appreciation of seemingly small 
and insignificant things, — which we found to be characteristic both of 
the German temper and of Emerson's mind, — is a strongly developed 
sense for the spiritual unity of all things, a strongly developed conscious- 



KUNO FRANCKE 5 

ness of the supremacy of the infinite whole of which all individual 
beings are only parts, a divining perception of the spirituality, or collec- 
tive personality, of the universe ; and here again is seen a point of 
contact between Emerson and Germany. How deeply German mysti- 
cism of the Middle Ages had drawn from this well of the Infinite, how 
strongly it had imbued even the popular mind with the idea of self- 
surrender and absorption in the divine spirit, may be illustrated by an 
anecdote of the fourteenth century attached to the name of the great 
preacher and mystic thinker, John Tauler. It is said that at the time 
when Tauler was at the height of his fame and popularity in Strassburg, 
one day a simple layman came to him and frankly told him that in spite 
of all his sacred learning and his fine sermons he was further removed 
from the knowledge of God than many an unlettered man of the people. 
Upon the advice of the layman, — so the story runs, — Tauler now with- 
drew from the world, gave away his books, refrained from preaching, and 
devoted himself in solitude to prayerful contemplation. Not until two 
years later did he dare to ascend the pulpit again, but when he attempted 
to speak, his words failed him ; under the scorn and derision of the con- 
gregation he was forced to leave the church, and was now considered by 
everybody a perverted fool. But in this very crisis he discovered the 
Infinite within himself, the very contempt of the world filled him with 
the assurance of his nearness to God, the spirit came over him, his 
tongue loosened as of its own accord, and he suddenly found himself 
possessed by a power of speech that stirred and swayed the whole city as 
no preacher ever had done before. 

This story of the fourteenth century may be called a symbolic and 
instinctive anticipation of the well defined philosophic belief in the 
spiritual oneness of the universe, which was held by all the great German 
thinkers and poets of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the 
nineteenth century. Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Tieck, Jean Paul, Kant, 
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, however much they difi^ered in temper and 
specific aims, all agreed in this, that the whole visible manifold world was 
to them the expression of the same infinite personality, the multiform 
embodiment of one universal mind ; they all saw the crowning glory and 
divinity of man in his capacity to feel this unity of the world, to hear 
the voice of the world spirit within him, to be assured of its eternity in 
spite of the constant change and decay of visible forms. 

Again there is no need of commenting upon the close affinity of all 
this with Emerson's views of spiritual personality. But, by way of 
illustration, it may be fitting to place side by side with each other two 
utterances, one by Emerson, the other by Novalis, upon the essential 



6 GERMAN PERSONALITY 

unity underlying all life, — utterances which, but for the difference of 
style and artistic quality, might have come from the same man. This is 
Novaiis: — 

"Nature has all the changes of an infinite soul, and surprises us through her 
ingenious turns and fancies, movements and fluctuations, great ideas and oddities, 
more than the most intellectual and gifted man She knows how to vivify and beau- 
tify everything, and, though there seems to reign in individual things an unconscious, 
meaningless mechanism, the eye that sees deeper recognizes nevertheless a wondrous 
sympathy with the human heart. * * * Does not the rock become an individual 
' Thou ' in the very moment that I address it ? And in what way do I differ from the 
brook when I look down into its waves with tender sadness and lose my tho\ights in 
its movement as it glides on ? "' 

And here is Emerson's somewhat dilettanteish, but after all unerring, 
speculation : — 

" The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat from the 
river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it j 
the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents ; the light 
resembles the heat which rides with it through space. Each creature is only a modi- 
fication of the other ; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical 
law is one and the same. So intimate is this unity that, it is easily seen, it lies under 
the undermost garment of nature and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. * * * It 
is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of 
Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of 
Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which 
animates all men." 

As the fourth, and last, evidence of temperamental affinity between 
German character and Emerson, — an affinity resting, I repeat, upon the 
common basis of insistence on personality, — I mention courage of per- 
sonal conviction and disdain of intellectual compromises. I mention 
this point last, because it seems to me the most important of all. It 
cannot be denied that in a country where every one is constantly affected, 
in one way or another, by that which the masses think, desire, or dislike, 
there is no greater danger for the individual than the lack of intellectual 
differentiation. Democracy is by no means the only, or necessarily the 
best, safeguard for intellectual independence. On the contrary, it may 
foster the desire in the individual to adapt himself to a generally accepted 
standard of opinion, to avoid frictions, to smooth down the sharp corners 
of personal conviction, to shun principles, to embrace opportunism. I 
cannot rid myself of the impression that American university and college 
life shows the effect of this natural tendency. There is a decided 
monotony of type, a prevalence of mediocrity about it. There are few 



KUNO FRANCKE 7 

college professors who are more than good college professors, few that 
stand for some great principle, few fighters, few leaders of public opinion, 
few of whom it might be said that they represent the national conscience. 
It is different in Germany. The German /iies contrasts; he iihs friction; 
he Hies intellectual controversy; he identifies himself with the cause 
which he represents, and since he loses himself in his cause, he does not 
hesitate to use plain speech, even at the risk of being too plain for some 
ears. I do not close my eves to the defects which are the concomitant 
trait of this national characteristic. It has undoubtedly led in German 
political life to so bewildering a variety of inimical factions and party plat- 
forms as to make parliamentary government well-nigh impossible; it gives 
to German scientific controversy often a tone of personal bitterness and 
acrimoniousness which to outsiders cannot be but repulsive or amusing. 
And yet it is true that here are the very roots of German greatness. It 
is intellectual courage which has made Germany, in spite of state omnipo- 
tence and clerical supremacy, the home of free thought; it is the dis- 
dain of compromises which lends to life in Germany, with all its draw- 
backs, its oddities, its quarrelsomeness, its lack of urbanity, such an 
intense and absorbing interest; it is the insistence upon principle which 
makes the German universities the chosen guardians of national ideals, 
which draws into their service the freest, most progressive, and boldest 
minds of the country, which endows them with the best of republicanism. 
Emerson was not a university man in the German sense. But of all 
American writers of the century none has expressed or lived out this 
fundamental tenet of German university life as completely as he. Indeed 
his whole life-work was one continuous defiance of the standards of the 
multitude, whether fashionable or otherwise. In his resignation from the 
pastorate; in his resistance against official obligations which would have 
hemmed in his free activity ; in his advocacy of manual training for 
children, of the elective system in college studies ; in his championship 
of the workman against the encroachments of industrialism; in his 
speeches against Daniel Webster and the Fugitive Slave Law, — every- 
where the same free, undaunted, self-reliant personality, "a reformer" 
(to quote his own description of the ideal American), " a reformer not con- 
tent to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by 
his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and 
upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent 
in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all 
who follow him to go in honor and with benefit." And so it has come to 
pass that he unconsciously characterized himself and his mission for the 
American people in that noble passage of the ''Lecti;re on the Times"; — 



8 GERMAN PERSONALITY 

"Now an^ then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more surrendered 
•oul, more informed and led by God, which is much in advance of the rest, quite 
beyond their sympathy, but predicts what shall soon be the general fulness ; as when 
we stand by the seashore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far 
higher than any foregoing one, and recedes ; and for a long while none comes up to 
that mark ; but after some time the whole sea is there and beyond it." 



II. 

Thus far we have been considering certain traits of character which 
reveal an inner affinity between Emerson and the German mind. But — as 
is well known — there is a more immediate and direct connection between 
the two. Emerson has a similar relation to the great German idealists 
of the eighteenth century as the Apostles were thought by the church to 
have to the Prophets. He is inspired by their thought, transmitted to 
him for the most part by Coleridge and Carlyle; he adds little to it that 
is original or new, but he applies it to the needs of his time and his 
people ; and since he speaks to a free people, a people entering with 
youthful energy upon a career of boundless activity, he gives to this 
thought an even greater vitality, a more intensely human vigor than it had 
in the hands of his masters. 

What were the main features of the new humanism held up to the 
world by the great Germans of the end of the eighteenth and the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, bv Kant, Schelling, and Fichte, by 
Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis? In the first place, an absolute freedom 
from traditional authority. Probably never in the history of mankind has 
there been a period when men looked at things from as broad a point of 
view and with so little bias. Humanity in the largest sense was the 
chosen study of the age. Everywhere, — in language, in literature, in 
political institutions, in religion, — men tried to detect the human element 
and brought it to light with all the fearlessness of scientific ardor. With 
this boldness of research there was allied, secondly, a supreme interest in 
the inner life. Man was considered bound up, to be sure, with the 
world of the senses, and confined to it as the scene of his activity, yet 
essentially a spiritual being, determining the material world rather than 
determined by it, responsible for his actions to the unerring tribunal of 
his own moral consciousness. In the sea of criticism and doubt which 
had swept away traditional conceptions and beliefs, this inner conscious- 
ness appeared as the one firm rock. Here, so it seemed, were the true 
foundations for a new religious belief, a belief which maintains that it is 
absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise than by fulfilling one's duties 
to men, a belief which considers the divine rather as the final goal than 



KUNO FRANCKE 9 

as the preexisting cause of life. And lastly, there was a joyous optimism 
in the men of this age which could not help raising them into a higher 
sphere. They believed in the future. They believed in eternity. They 
believed that humanity was slowly advancing toward perfection, that a 
time must come when the thoughts of the few wise men, the dreams of 
the few poets and prophets would become transfused into the life-blood 
of the masses, when the good would be done because it is the good, when 
instinct and dutv would be reconciled ; and they derived their highest 
inspirations from the feeling that they themselves were workers in the 
service of this cause. 

It is easv to see that here are found side by side all the essential 
elements of Emerson's spiritual world, — his freedom from tradition, his 
deep interest in man, his belief in moral freedom and in the moral order 
of the universe, his pantheism, his optimism, his confiding trust in the 
perfectibility of the race. But it is worth noticing that in the application 
of these principles there is, — as I intimated before, — a decided diflFerence 
between Emerson and his masters. The great German idealists, while 
embracing the human race in their thought, while glorying in the idea of 
a strong and free popular life, addressed themselves in reality to a small 
circle of elect spirits; these they hoped to influence; to them they 
adapted their manner of presentation ; with the people at large they had 
little to do. They were, in other words, with all their democratic sym- 
pathies, at heart thoroughly aristocratic. The result is that German 
literature of that period, both poetry and prose, bears for the most part 
the stamp of a certain over- refinement, of studied culture; that it often 
lacks simplicity and the strong, direct appeal to the popular heart. 

It must further be borne in mind that the condition of the German 
people at that time was one of utter political disintegration, that the very 
foundations of national existence were crumbling away, one after another, 
before the onslaught of foreign invasion, and that the task of the future 
was nothing less than a complete reorganization of public life. Whatever 
there is, then, in German literature of that time of popular appeal is 
dictated by distress, by the bitter need of the hour, and has to do with 
the death agony of a social order sinking into ruins, and the birth throes 
of a new order not yet fully formed. 

Emerson, on the other hand, although his life was spent amid the 
most refined circles of New England culture, although his own utterances 
never fail to appeal to the finest and most elevated aspirations of the 
human heart, yet always looked beyond his own cultivated surroundings 
into the wider spheres of common, ordinary life. With all his aristocratic 
bearing and predilections, he was at heart thoroughly democratic. And 



lo GERMAN PERSONALITY 

the people to which he gave his life's work was not a nation threatened 
in its existence, crippled, defeated, but a nation that only recently had 
won its freedom, a healthy young giant, teeming with untried power and 
latent vitality, unexperienced but perfectly normal, untouched by disap- 
pointment, a vast future in his loins. Is it a wonder that Emerson's 
application of German idealism should, on the whole, have been more 
sane, more normal, more vigorous, more genuinely popular, more univer- 
sally human than German idealism itself? 

Let me illustrate this side of Emerson's relation to Germany by a 
brief parallel between Emerson and that German thinker with whom he 
bears the most striking resemblance, although he was acquainted with his 
thought only through the medium of Carlyle's writings. Johann Gottlieb 
Fichte. There is no greater or more inspiring figure in intellectual his- 
tory than Fichte's. In originality and constructiveness of thought he so 
far surpasses Emerson that the two can hardly be mentioned together. It 
is as men, as writers, as citizens, that they should be compared. 

Fichte's historic task was this; to concentrate the German mind, dis- 
sipated by over-indulgence in aesthetic culture, upon the one topic of 
national reorganization. He felt clearly that Germany's future could be 
saved only through an entire change of heart. What had brought on 
the national catastrophe, what had made the ancient glory of Germany 
go down before the triumphant standard of Napoleon, was, to his mind, 
the unchecked rule of egotism ; what was to insure national salvation, 
was, according to him, unconditional self-surrender. As he himself 
says : — 

"The rational life consists in this, that the individual should forget himself in 
the species, sacrificing his existence to the existence of the whole ; while the irrational 
life consists in this, that the individual should not consider or love anything but him- 
self and should devote his whole existence to his own well being. And if the rational 
is the good and the irrational the bad, then there is only one virtue : to forget one's 
self; and only one vice : to think of one's self." 

This, then, was the appeal which Fichte made to his over-cultivated, over- 
individualized, and thereby disorganized nation. Whatever progress man- 
kind thus far has made, — for there is progress even in decay, — whatever 
blessings of civilization we possess, it has been made possible only through 
the privations, the sufferings, the self-sacrifice of men who, before our time, 
lived and died for the life of the race. Let us emulate these men. Let 
every one of us be a public character. Let our philosophers and poets be 
conscious that it is not they but the universal spirit in them which speaks 
through their thought or their song, that it would be a sin against the spirit 



KUNO FRANCKE ii 

to degrade their talents to the bondage of personal ambition and vanity. 
Let our political life be free from despotism and monopoly ; let our social 
institutions be regulated on the basis of a common obligation of each to 
all. Let the working classes be made to feel "that they serve, not the 
caprice of an individual, but the good of the whole, and this only so far 
as the whole is in need of them." Let the rich live in such a manner as 
to be able to say, "Not a farthing of our profits is spent without a benefit 
to higher culture ; our gain is the gain of the community." Let the ideal 
of a perfect society be the guiding motive of the age: — 

"Nothing can live by itself and for itself; everything lives in the whole, and the 
whole continually sacrifices itself to itself in order to live anew. This is the law of 
life. Whatever has come to the consciousness of existence must fall a victim to the 
progress of all existence. Only there is a difference whether you are dragged to the 
shambles like a beast with bandaged eyes or whether, in full and joyous presentiment 
of the life which will spring forth from your sacrifice, you offer yourself freely on the 
altar of eternity." 

In times of distress, in any great national crisis, this splendid appeal of 
Fichte's for self-surrender of the individual will prove its inspiring force, 
will ever anew demonstrate its imperishable worth. But it can hardly be 
denied that it bears the earmarks of the extraordinary and exceptional 
times which forced it from Fichte's mind. Its Spartan rigor, the demand 
of state omnipotence implied in it, and actually drawn as its consequence 
by Fichte himself, its tendency toward uniformity in education, its stoic 
contempt for the instinctive, do not make it a safe rule for all times and 
all nations, and therefore detract from its universally human value. 

Emerson's historic task was this : to expand the consciousness of the 
American people, preoccupied with material prosperity, to a full realiza- 
tion of its spiritual mission. He did not lack penetration into the evils 
of the time and of the society surrounding him, nor did he spare the 
scourge of sarcasm and moral indignation in chastising these evils. 
What more drastic summing up of the degrading and belittling influence 
of wealth has ever been given than in his contrasting of father and son — 
the father a self-made man, the son a creature of circumstance ; — 

" Instead of the masterly good humor and sense of power and fertility of resource 
in himself; instead of those strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, 
that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing heart which the father had, whom 
nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and fish, seemed 
all to know and to serve, — we have now a puny, protected person, guarded by walls 
and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches and men-servants and women-servants 
from the earth and the sky, and who, bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by 
all that endangers those possessions, and is forced to spend so much time in guarding 



12 GERMAN PERSONALITY 

them, that he has quite lost sight of their original use, namely, to help him to his 
ends, to the prosecution of his love, to the helping of his friend, to the worship of his 
God, to the enlargement of his knowledge, to the serving of his country, to the 
indulgence of his sentiment ; and he is now what is called a rich man, — the menial 
and runner of his riches." 

And there are whole philippics against plutocracy contained in such sen- 
tences as, " The whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the 
poor," or in the lines: — 

" ' Tis the day of the chattel ; web to weave and corn to grind ; 
Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." 

But Emerson did not find himself, as Fichte did, in the midst of a 
national breakdown. The social evils against which he directed his 
criticism and invective were concomitant phenomena of a national devel- 
opment, at bottom sound and full of promise. His message, therefore, 
while fully accepting Fichte's appeal for self-surrender of private interests 
to public purposes, culminated not in the demand of concentration, but 
in the demand of expansion of the individual. To him as to Fichte the 
common welfare was the highest goal; to him as to Fichte every individual, 
the farmer, the mechanic, the business man, the scholar, the artist, was, 
above all, a public servant. But this service consisted to him 
primarily in the fullest development of all higher instincts, in keeping 
(as he expressed it) one's source higher than one's tap, and in the 
freest possible blending together of individual activities. Nothing was 
further removed from his ideals than patriarchalism or state omnipotence ; 
never would he have been willing to entrust the training of the rising 
generation to the exclusive control of the state, never would he have 
submitted to the limitations of a socialistic community. To the last he 
adhered to the principle formulated in the best years of his manhood, "A 
personal ascendency, — that is the only fact much worth considering"; to 
the last he saw the hope of the future in keeping this spirit alive: — 

"In the brain of a fanatic ; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city 
boys very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly appraised 
him shall be ; in the love glance of a girl ; in the hair-splitting conscientiousness of 
some eccentric person who has found some new scruple to embarrass himself and his 
neighbors withal, is to be found that which shall constitute the times to come." 

May we not, without disparaging the splendid services of Fichte and 
the other German idealists, say that here there is a message containing 
more of universal truth, more wisdom applicable to the common, natural, 



KUNO FRANCKE 13 

and normal needs of humanity, than is to be found in their noble and 
extraordinary flights ? 

III. 

Emerson belongs to the world. But it seems as though at the present 
moment there was no country which had a greater claim upon his services 
and a more urgent need of them than Germany. It cannot be denied 
that the great political struggles and achievements, the remarkable indus- 
trial and commercial development of the last fifty years have, for the 
moment, stifled somewhat the German genius, or at least diverted it from 
its spiritual flight. Our age has accomplished gigantic tasks. It has 
brought about the welding together of some thirty mutually jealous and 
distrustful states and principalities into one united nation ; it has carried 
through a war crowned with unparalled victories and triumphs; it has 
changed Germany from a prevailingly agricultural country to one of the 
great manufacturing centres of the globe; it has made her one of the 
foremost competitors in the policy of expansion now dominating the 
world. All this belongs to the realm of fact rather than to the realm of 
the spirit. It has led to an over-emphasis of the will; it has blunted the 
feeling; it has crippled the moral sense; it has clogged speculation; it 
has brutalized personality. 

Religious life in modern Germany is almost wholly latent. I do not 
doubt that it exists, not only among the thousands of devoted men and 
women who serve the church of their fathers in traditional manner and 
form, but, perhaps, even more among the millions who have turned away 
with hatred and contempt from rituals and creeds which to them have 
become empty phrases. But the fact remains that there is no form of 
religious life in Germany which could in any way be said to be a true 
expression of the national conscience. In ethical theories the average 
German of today, whether consciously or not, is a follower of Nietzsche. 
He believes in personality, but it is not the personality of the great Ger- 
man idealists of a century ago, the personality which is a part of the 
infinite spirit, a visible manifestation of the divine, — but the personality 
of the cynic author of "Menschliches-Allzumenschliches," a bundle of 
animal instincts, of the desire for self-preservation and self-gratification, 
the thirst for power, the impulse to create and to command. In the 
sciences, — both mental and physical, — the man of facts, the specialist, is 
the man of the hour; and whatever may be said in favor of specializa- 
tion as the only sound basis of scientific research (there clearly is no 
other equally sound), the exclusive rule of specialization has undoubtedly 
given to our whole scholarly life something spiritless, narrow, mechanical. 



14 GERMAN PERSONALITY 

Nobody has felt this more deeply and expressed it more clearly than 
Herman Grimm, the last great representative of the golden age of Ger- 
man literature who reached into our own time. He says : — 

" We have the facts in our heads, we are flush and ready at any time to pay out 
in cash any amount of knowledge up to the limit of our drafts. But the marriage of 
our thoughts with the spirit which shelters them is a cool marriage of convention 
without communion and without children. Nowhere do we dare to draw ultimate 
consequences. What goes beyond the sphere of fact, of that which can be proven by 
positive evidence, is looked upon as dangerous conjecture. Only the unimpeachable 
is loudly expressed and that opinion is passed by with frowning silence which has no 
other foundation than the deep conviction of him who uttered it." 

All the foregoing, it seems to me, must have made it apparent why 
Germany at the present moment in a peculiar and pregnant sense is ripe 
for Emerson. Emerson, as we have seen, is allied to the German mind 
by a deep and close affinity. He has the German love of individuality, 
the German seriousness of purpose and contempt of sham, the German 
delight in small things, the German sense of the infinite, the German 
intellectual courage and disdam of compromise. In addition to this, he 
derived his highest and best thought to a large extent from the bountiful 
store of German idealism of a hundred years ago, and he enriched this 
thought and gave it still wider significance by applying it to the needs of 
a free, youthful nation. Now the time has come for Germany to receive 
from Emerson. Now the time has come for Emerson to pay back to 
Germany what he owes to her. Now the time has come for him to 
restore to Germany the idealism of her own thinkers in a purified, saner, 
and more truly human form. 

This is not mere speculation. Emerson's career in Germany has 
already begun. No less a man than Herman Grimm first drew atten- 
tion to him as one of the truly great, as a spiritual power, as a helper 
and comforter, as a deliverer from the cynicism, pessimism, and fact- 
worship of the present day. He said in one of his earliest essays : — 

"Emerson is a perfect swimmer in the element of modern life. He does not 
fear the tempests of the future ; because he divines the calm which will follow them. 
He does not hate, contradict, combat ; because his understanding of men and their 
defects is too great, his love for them too strong. I cannot but follow his steps with 
deep reverence and look at him with wonder, as he divides the chaos of modern life 
gently and without passion into its several provinces. A long acquaintance has assured 
me of him ; and thinking of this man I feel that in times of old there really could be 
teachers with whom their disciples were ready to share any fate, because everything 
appeared to them doubtful and lifeless without the spirit of the man whom they were 
following." 



KUNO FRANCKE 15 

Grimm's genuine admiration did not remain without effect upon think- 
ing men in Germany. Gradually but steadily the circle of Emerson's 
influence widenrd. Julian Schmidt, Friedrich Spielhagen were affected by 
him ; even Niet/.sche could not resist his personality. From the eighties 
on, two Austrian writers helped to increase his following : Anton E. Schon- 
bach, to whom we owe the first objectively critical account in German 
of Emerson's work, and Karl Federn, who first published a comprehen- 
sive translation of his essays. Just now a second, and more ambitious, 
'edition of Emerson's works in German is being published in Leipzig. 

Meanwhile there has been gathering strength, independently from 
Emerson, a movement which is bound to draw still wider circles of Ger- 
man intellectual life toward Emerson, a reaction against the pessimism 
of Schopenhauer, the cynicism of Nietzsche, the soulless monotony of 
scientific specialization. Herman Grimm's own life-work, his incessant 
insistence on artistic culture, on a free, noble, reverent personality, was 
perhaps the initial force in this spiritual reawakening. But other and 
younger men have followed in his steps. The signs of the time are full 
of promise. The extraordinary success of such a book as Harnack's 
*' Essence of Christianity "; the widespread influence of such a university 
teacher, such a wise, free, kindly man of ideals as Friedrich Paulsen ; the 
devoted efforts of Pastor Naumann, of Bruno Wille, of Wilhelm Bolsche, 
and others, to win the masses back to spiritual hope and an enlightened 
faith ; the new life kindled in poetry, the novel, and the drama, — all this 
is conclusive evidence that we are on the very verge of a new era of 
German idealism. And if it comes, there will come with it the demand : 
less Nietzsche and more Emerson ; and a new intellectual bond between 
America and Germany will have been established. 



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